


Ode to the Ice God

by ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes



Series: saint raphael over europe [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Angst, Catholicism, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Murder, Pirates, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Platonic Soulmates, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, catholicism aint having a good time right now okay, the hurt/comfort will come eventually i promise, theyre pirates what did you expect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-16
Updated: 2020-10-16
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:27:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27034930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes/pseuds/ThatWeirdGuyInTheBushes
Summary: Matthew remembers those eyes, now. Shivering and shaking, clinging for life on a piece of ship haul, he looks at the stars reflecting on the ocean and remembers the eyes of a Navy man. He coughs and it throws him forward, hunching over the wood as his teeth chatter.Noah’s Arc, a part of him whispers, all high-head and Catholic church. It’s Noah’s Arc, and you’ve been left behind.-A pirate floats in the middle of the ocean, alone and not ready to die.
Series: saint raphael over europe [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1973095
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Ode to the Ice God

Matthew killed a man when he was fourteen.

He had killed before, and he killed after, but he remembers this one because he got to see the man’s eyes, and he’d never seen that before. He couldn’t tell the colour, not through the smoke and the reflection of the flames, but he’s always assumed it was blue.

Blue eyes and fire, blue eyes and a knife. Blue eyes and dark hair and a shuddering breath louder than a cannon shot.

Matthew remembers those eyes, now. Shivering and shaking, clinging for life on a piece of ship haul, he looks at the stars reflecting on the ocean and remembers the eyes of a Navy man. He coughs and it throws him forward, hunching over the wood as his teeth chatter.

_ Noah’s Arc, _ a part of him whispers, all high-head and Catholic church.  _ It’s Noah’s Arc, and you’ve been left behind. _

Matthew grabs those thoughts by the neck and throws them into the ocean. He has no right to think of Holy things, not anymore.

He turns his mind away from the stuff of God and thinks of Lucy.

Red hair, tucked under a cap. A man’s wardrobe, a necklace of conquered captains bones. The first time he met her, he thought he was going to die.

He sucks in a breath and it vibrates down his ribcage. He can feel her sword on his throat and see her eyes, hazel and eternally glinting with the reflection of a fire. “Are you coming or not?” She had asked. And his twelve-year-old self got a full-body shiver and nodded so slow, trying not to get cut.

And Lucy, sixteen and wildfire, had put her sword away, held out a hand, and told him to hurry the hell up.

She was crazy, he thinks. The past tense crawls into his soul and sinks in its teeth. He fucking hates past tense.

“What would be your last words, if you got to choose?” Matthew was sitting in the crow’s nest, the night after killing that Navy man, feeling Lucy below him on the ladder but refusing to look in her eyes.

“Last words are shite,” she told him. “If you really wanna say something, say it when you can still get a fuckin’ response.”

_ I love you, _ he thinks now, a little too late. And he hates himself for that, for not saying it sooner. For being too scared to tell her that he loved her like he knew families should love each other. For thinking all this time that the only way to love someone was the way a man loved his wife.

Her last words to him were “Get some rest, Matty. Big day tomorrow.”

Matthew can’t help but think that no one will ever hear his last words, and it hurts until he thinks that Lucy would have laughed about that. No one will ever hear her real last words either. He bets they were Gaelic, bets they were swears. She only taught him two, but he says them as loud as he’s able because if he’s going to die here he’d like those to be the last things he says.

The second time they spoke, she called him a posh bastard. Slapped him upside the head and told him to learn some respect.

He  _ was  _ a posh bastard, and he knew it well, but he still wanted to smash her nose in when she said it.

And if it weren’t for the sword and the way her ribs clung to her shirt, he would have jeered at her about Ireland. But he swallowed it down, and he’s always been glad because he’s sure she would have made him walk the plank.

He misses her, in that nauseous, pressurized way that he misses people. It reminds him of the small gasps of air between drowning- when the saltwater is still in your stomach but the cold air is burning your lungs.

He feels young, for a moment there. Achingly, frighteningly, powerfully young. He’s twenty years old and too cold for a fire. 

He was putting his crossbow away after a successful merchant ship raid when Lucy told him he should be angry.

He could have played dumb, could have asked for clarification. But he knew what she meant and he’s never liked to waste time. She thinks he’s not angry at England. At what they’ve done, to his mother and father and his people. She needs to know if he feels it too, that resonance of a lone Catholic church bell. The kind of sound that fills up your chest to the brim. “What makes you think that I’m not?”

And he’ll never forget how she looked at him then, her furrowed eyebrows twitching and her knife spinning in her hand as she finally understood what his anger looked like.

His grief is so heavy, it’s grip so tight, that it feels like a physical thing, like a giant. And he said he wouldn’t bring the Holy book into his thoughts, but he can’t help that he thinks of David, of Goliath.

He wishes there was enough water inside him to cry.

When he first met Lucy, he thought himself David. Her towering form, him barely up to her chest, as she yelled and swore at him with her sword by her side.

“Why a crossbow?” She had asked, the third time they spoke. “Why not a rifle?”

And he didn’t have an answer. He doesn’t have the answers to so many of the questions that she’d asked him before.  _ Why are you here, what are you doing, why do you think that the man’s eyes are blue?  _ He doesn’t know why he started using a crossbow. He doesn’t know when his heart settled into that bow twang, or when he decided he’d take up a sniper nest.

He thought he knew when it started. When he was a starving little boy with the blood of riots on his hands. When he was stealing from a weapons shop and shooting makeshift arrows at trees.

“Let me come with you,” he’d demanded. Looking into a captain's eyes, standing on the docs of a small town in England. And when the captain rolled his eyes, Matthew took his crossbow off his back and shot an apple out of a crewmates hand. And as soon as that crewmate had recovered she stuck her knife to his throat.

He almost laughs, thinking about that. Captain John White, the ironically named former slave, laughing at Lucy and calling her back. Looking Matthew up and down, looking at his ribs and his shaking knees and the fury and the fear and the cold in his eyes and saying, quite simply: “Alright then.”

And Matthew had stood there, in total shock, his old crossbow shivering in his grip. And then Lucy held out her hand.

He wasn’t always cold. In the years he had with his parents, in a nice house in the Empire, he sat by a fireside. His parents were Catholic softly, secretly. But not softly enough.

There is a place for a fire. On the ends of torches, inside hazel eyes, on the frays of Catholic clothes. Matthew is not one of those places.

Matthew is a man made of ice, slow and creeping and always coming back.

He shivers and remembers practice duels on the deck with wooden sticks. Lucy would win and win and keep winning, and Matthew would stay up into the night memorizing her movements and drawing them in the dust of the haul. He didn’t win his first fight for months, but he won it.

Captain White patted him on the back. Lucy was still on the ground, her eyes wide with shock, and Matthew was swaying and Captain White was patting him on the back and smiling and saying “Good job, son” and he might have never felt better.

Captain White has been gone for over a year now, but he’s still made a place in Matthew’s head.

A storm killed Lucy. That feels so cheap now. She knew as well as he did that fire couldn’t make it forever underwater but he always thought that he’d get to send her off. A real Catholic burial, she told him. An Irish wake, her body on the table before being laid back into God’s good Earth.

That was what she told him.

And now she’s at the bottom of the fucking ocean, and ridiculously, he starts sobbing. He can’t cry and it’s making his head hurt but he can’t stop. She wanted one thing. She wanted one thing.

In a horrifying second, he realizes that he deserves to die here.

That stops the sobbing, the franticness. That makes him go still, go quiet. He wants to come back to himself now, to worry about it like a brief thought, to be able to chalk it up to that French bullshit about the call of the void and self-destructive instinct. But it doesn’t go away.

It doesn’t repeat.

It just lingers there, sitting in his head, frosting over the walls and reminding him, calmly, that he deserves to die here.

And it’s right.

He looks around, staring at his numb fingers and the ocean water and the grey fog. He peers through his heavy eyes at the edge of the plank, at the frost creeping on it, the same colour as his eyes.

He can hear his teeth clinking together. Blue water, the same colour as the navy man's eyes.

The man he killed. How many men has he killed? Too many to count. He remembers throwing up after the first time, twelve years old with adrenaline in his blood, not able to focus on it until hours after the fact. Everyone was nursing their wounds or mopping the deck and he was realizing that he just killed someone. And then he was vomiting over the deck and tears were burning in his eyes because he was going to hell.

When did he stop crying about it? When did he grow numb? After the second kill? The fifth? The tenth?

He always knew he was going to die, that there was no place after that but down. But he’s never thought that he would die by choice. That he would give up. That he would believe and know in his heart that no matter how cruel and slow and torturous his death was, he deserved every second of it.

What has he done that deserves better?

Matthew closes his eyes.

He thinks of his father, of holding his hand as they walked to the riverbed and he taught Matthew how to read. You could tell in his long hands and accent that he was upper-class born. Matthew looked like him, then, although he’s grown into his mother's looks since. He’s kept his father’s eyes.

They were never rich, not really. They had a comfortable home and that was more than most others, so it was enough. His father married down to be with his wife, and they loved each other like Matthew’s never seen anyone love anyone. 

His father and Genesis. His father and the Bible. Squiggly lines becoming words become sentences becoming scripture. There was a tranquillity there. His childhood; a Holy, quiet thing.

He didn’t deserve that.

He didn’t deserve Lucy either. Didn’t deserve her being there and teaching him how to sword fight and buying him new arrows and hugging him after nightmares even though she hated hugs because it made him feel alright. Because she might have been hard to love but at least she had something in her. At least she had a spark inside of her, something worth loving, something to keep people warm. And Matthew?

Matthew doesn’t have any of that. He and her were bad people but she had something to give. He deserves to die in the cold, his stomach empty and his teeth chattering, because he killed everyone he’s ever loved with this kind of ice. This mighty iceberg under his skin. There’s just nothing good about him.

He deserves to die here.

He relaxes his fingers. Might as well speed this up. Sink below the waves and take a deep breath.

He got out his last words, the ones that he wanted. He thinks of Lucy’s shoulder beneath his head, the day she almost drowned, smelling the saltwater still in her skin as they breathed in tandem. She ran a hand through his hair, only down to his shoulders back then. He thinks that was the first time he thought it, closing his eyes to stop the tears. He reminded himself, over and over, that she was here, that she was fine, that she was breathing. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Let’s go to Venice.”

_I love you,_ he thought without meaning to. _You’re my sister and I’m so glad you’re not dead because I love you._

They were going to go to Venice. They’d never been, but they were going to go.

He imagines himself there, sleeping on Lucy’s shoulder, listening to the waves lapping the ocean on a nice beach in Venice, the kind he’s only ever seen in paintings.

There. He can die to that thought. The sun is shining and the water is warm and everything is perfect, there. He can die to this kind of thought.

But his fingers don’t let go of the board.

He tries to loosen them up, still imagining Venice, but they don’t move. He opens his eyes, annoyed.  _ What the hell? _

_ Let go, _ he tells his hands.  _ Just let go. _

But they don’t.

The ocean pushes him forward and Matthew sees the sun begin to rise, breaking through the heavy fog.  _ A beautiful view, yes. Can we die now? _

And his fingers don’t move.

He’s so cold and everything is so numb and he can’t even move his legs so why the fuck is he still on this board?

That’s when he sees something on the horizon. Brown, sleek, too small to be Navy, barrels dragged behind it, to increase the size from a distance. Pirate ship. It’s a pirate ship.

_ Lovely for them, having such a nice ship. I’m sure they’re very happy with it. Let go now. _

He could swim to the thing, but he doesn’t deserve that. Doesn’t need to keep dragging himself around, ship to ship, sinking everyone along the way. He’s a bad luck charm. He doesn’t need anyone else to die over it.

And finally, his hands slip.

He lets himself fall under, closing his eyes against the saltwater. Red hair in his face, the beaches of Venice. He tries to breathe in.

His mouth stays closed.  _ Not this again. Just stop. I’m not swimming up. _

His lungs are burning but he can’t breathe in, and the beaches aren’t real and the only hair in his face is his own. And before he can try turning and swimming down, his legs are kicking. He breaks the surface. He can’t stop himself before he’s sucking in a deep breath and the waves are plunging him under again.

_ Stop, _ he commands his body.  _ Just stop! Just die already! _

He can’t feel his legs but they’re moving. He can’t feel his fingers but they’re reaching out and he’s opening his eyes, searching the water. He’s burning with saltwater but he’s grabbing the board again. Gasping for air. His hands slip and he goes back under. Finally, his body stops fighting him and he thinks that he’s going to die. A proper pirate's death, down to Davy Jones, down to hell. 

_ A Catholic grave,  _ his mind says.  _ You can’t give her a burial but you’re the only person on this Earth who would ever give her a grave. _

The thought comes in, breaks through the image he’s trying to keep in his brain. But it doesn’t just sit there, it doesn't quietly settle over his mind in a layer of cold, like every other thought he’s had in these waters. Instead, it comes in roaring and scorching, screaming and reverberating and  _ hot.  _ The thought comes in like fucking fire.

_ You are the only person alive who would ever give her a grave. _

He shoots out of the water, scrambling for the board and keeping his eyes peeled open.

He sees the ships hull, coming in his direction. He tries to yell and it comes out like a squeak. But that fiery thought inside of him is filling him up and giving strength to his tired limbs. He swallows hard and waves an arm up in the air.

He repeats the call over and over, clearing his throat between each one until the ship is almost there. It’ll pass by him in barely any time at all.

“Help!”

He can’t see anything through his squinted, ruined eyes, stinging with saltwater. He thinks for a second that this last burst of energy was useless, that he’s just going to die here anyway and it doesn’t matter, it never mattered.

Then the rope hits him. And he’s clinging to it like he’s never clung to anything in his life. He imagines Lucy’s hand beneath his. The callouses he’s memorized. The long line in the middle of her palm that fortune tellers used to say meant a prosperous life. The imprint of her sword handle in her skin, from holding it so often.

Matthew’s pulled onto the deck, and he is alive. He’s alone and he’s cold and his sister is dead but he’s alive _. _

_ Ireland, _ he thinks.  _ A Catholic grave with her god-given name in the country she was born in. You can die after that. But Lucy first. _

Someone hands him a pitcher of water and he drinks it slowly. He’ll put the grave up high. A church with a view. He’ll need a priest, maybe some of her family, if he can manage to find them.

He’ll die then. He’ll be  _ okay  _ with dying then.

Just one more thing. Just one more thing.

**Author's Note:**

> for an atheist im really big on this whole religious imagery thing
> 
> comment to give me power over god himself


End file.
